Han
Kang Yu-na stared at the ceiling with a vacant look and let out a long, emptying sigh.
"Haaaah...."
"This is not easy..."
Her drained voice was the only sound that carried through the empty studio.
It was late — the deep hours before dawn. Ever since that day she had thrown everything she had into writing the song, and still nothing she produced satisfied her.
"This isn't it..."
She puffed her cheeks out as far as they would go, then deflated with a leak of air and flopped face-first onto the desk.
She hit play on what she had so far. Music spilled from the speakers — still nothing more than a rough guide, a sketch of melody and a handful of chords. Even so, the feeling came through clearly. The feeling that this was not it.
A concept she had never once touched. The shape of it refused to come into her hands.
"Ah... should I just ask for help?"
The moment her head started to throb, one man rose naturally to mind. Kim Se-jun, the one who had sung with her. He was the one who had dreamed up the concept in the first place — wouldn't he already have the song sketched out too?
The temptation wrapped around her, fierce and warm. She shook her head.
"A senior has her pride!"
The pride and the name of a woman who had written hit after hit. A woman for whom the number-one spot on the charts was simply what happened. Her pride was far too sharp to go begging for help on a single composition from a man who hadn't even been debuted a year.
"You can do this. Yu-na. You can do this."
She clenched both fists, comforting herself, swearing she would write a song that would last forever.
Kim Se-jun was at home, chewing on a sandwich, when a text lit up his phone and a snort of laughter escaped him.
"Mm... huh?"
Kang Yu-na. And right after it, a cute little crying emoticon. He had a fairly good idea what she meant.
"So even Kang Yu-na is human, huh?"
Two weeks. Even for someone as experienced as she was, creation was the kind of work that could tie a knot in your brain no matter how hard you worried at it. He had wondered if she might be the exception. Apparently she was a person too.
He finished the sandwich in a few bites and sent a reply. Her answer landed in less than a minute.
Kim Se-jun paused over her message.
Anything in mind...
He had locked down the concept and nothing more. No melody had actually arrived. At best he had a vague sense of how it might be shaped.
She must be pretty desperate.
He scratched his head at her chat.
That was the last of it. Kim Se-jun dragged a chair over and sat down in front of his computer.
"Hmm... still. I should at least show up with something."
Strictly speaking, he was only a supporting player. Composition, mixing, producing — marketing, even — all of that was Kean Entertainment's job to handle. He was just there to put a voice on her song.
"But walking in with nothing at all would be a little sad, wouldn't it?"
He nudged a virtual instrument plugin and a quiet smile tugged at his mouth.
"A genius has his pride, after all."
A studio in Gangnam. It had once been a rental space where indie singers booked time to record. Kang Yu-na had since bought it out and turned it into her own workspace. Kim Se-jun shook his head at the kind of money it took to swallow an entire building, and called her.
"Hey, Yu-na. I'm here."
"Oh, you're here already? Hang on. I'll come out."
Less than a minute after he hung up, the door opened and Kang Yu-na stepped out. She looked like she had been sealed in that room for a long time. Her appearance was, to put it kindly, a wreck — sweatpants with the knees poked out, hair yanked into a careless knot.
How is she still this pretty? That's just cheating.
Even so, a kind of halo clung to her face, and for a second Kim Se-jun simply forgot to look away. Kang Yu-na smiled and scratched her head.
"A bit of a mess, huh? Sorry. I've been buried in writing."
"Hm? Ah — no, no. It's fine. Here. Coffee. Figured you might need it."
He held out the Americano he had picked up at a cafe, and her whole face brightened.
"Ahh! Thank you! I was dying for caffeine. Come in, come in."
He followed her inside. The studio was spotless — if you ignored the coffee cans stacked all over the desk.
"This coffee's really good. Where's it from?"
"Place by the convenience store at the intersection. Forgot the name."
"I need to start going there..."
She kept taking little sips, clearly pleased, then remembered herself.
"Oh, right. Want to hear it?"
"You've got something made?"
He asked it with genuine surprise. She waved a hand.
"Roughly, yeah... but it feels like something's missing."
Missing?
A faint smile touched Kim Se-jun's mouth. He had a fairly good idea what she meant by that.
"Alright. Let's hear it."
Kang Yu-na hit play, and a sweet melody unspooled from the speakers.
Not bad, actually.
A deeply lyrical ballad — quiet, then, in the chorus, a melody and a set of changes that reached straight for the heart. An ordinary listener would have been more than satisfied. It was not enough to satisfy a genius like Kang Yu-na. Just as she had said, something essential was absent.
"Well? Doesn't it feel like the one important thing got left out?"
Kim Se-jun had been listening with his eyes closed. At her question he opened them, a small smile already there.
"Yeah. You're missing one thing."
"Oh. Oppa, you know what it is?"
She answered with a sudden, fierce energy. Night after night of thinking had not filled that hollow. Could he fill it? Expectation shone in her eyes as Kim Se-jun walked over to the computer.
"Mind if I touch it for a second?"
"Go ahead."
She vacated the chair at once. He sat, held the melody and the chords in his head, and took her song apart.
Kang Yu-na watched with round eyes as her own track came to pieces. Then he began to put it back together.
What had been built from piano and violin, drums and acoustic guitar, was born again.
"Huh?"
A short sound escaped her. Gayageum and geomungo. Sanjo daegeum. Then taepyeongso and piri. His hands rebuilt her song out of gugak instruments of every color, and something bright and strange came into Kang Yu-na's eyes.
He's remaking it with traditional instruments?
She had never believed gugak instruments were lesser than Western ones. She had never believed the reverse, either. Each had its own virtues.
"I only swapped the instruments. Want to hear it?"
It was exactly what he said — nothing but a change of instruments. She doubted it could matter that much. Even so, a quiet expectancy rose in her, and she nodded.
"Yes."
Kim Se-jun smiled and hit play.
The same melody. And then the song reached her, and Kang Yu-na's eyes went wide.
From the first second, a plaintive intro. Gayageum and sanjo daegeum finding each other, and after them the crying voice of the taepyeongso. The instant she heard it, she knew.
This is it!
The same melody — and a completely different feeling. Something that reached for her emotions in a more primal way.
"Oppa? What is this? Why is it this good? I don't even know what I'm listening to right now."
The shock had her mouth hanging open; the words came out in a tangle. Same melody. Same chords. And it was not the same. The moment Kim Se-jun's version began, the image of Sim Cheong sinking into the waters of Indangsu rose unbidden in her mind. A moment that was, quite simply, magic.
"You okay?"
"It's amazing. You changed a few instruments and it turned into this?"
Instruments.
Kim Se-jun smiled, just a little, at her words.
"Changing the instruments filled in what was missing. Feeling. To be precise — Han."
"Han?"
Kang Yu-na's eyes went round. His words felt like grasping at clouds. She could not get a hold of them.
"The classics have a flavor of their own, right? A feeling of their own?"
"They do, yeah?"
"Then what's the feeling at the heart of our classics?"
"And that's what you mean by Han?"
He looked at her as she turned the question back on him, and a quiet smile warmed his face.
"Isn't that a little... broad?"
She still was not convinced. Kim Se-jun shook his head.
Han. A heart full of grievance and bitter sorrow. The word people reached for, again and again, when they tried to name what Korea felt like.
"Think about the old stories. The Tale of Sim Cheong. Heungbu and Nolbu. The Tale of Chunhyang. Kongjwi and Patjwi. Don't they all carry that same sense of being wronged — of a grief that has nowhere to go? In the heroes themselves?"
"Well... they do, I guess..."
"It's the same in novels like The Tale of Hong Gildong and The Record of Lady Sa. You cannot talk about our classics without talking about that feeling of injustice and bitter sorrow. And the one character that holds all of that emotion is Han. And when it comes to putting Han into music..."
"Gugak does it better. That's what you're saying?"
She cut across his long explanation with a small, knowing smile.
Among gugak instruments there were some that sounded especially sad. Gayageum and geomungo. Taepyeongso and daegeum, ajaeng and haegeum. Of course the feeling changed with the playing — but these were the ones people reached for when they needed to touch a plaintive heart. Instruments that, to a Korean ear, called up Han as naturally as breathing.
"It really does feel like it's hitting something more primitive. Ever since you rearranged it."
"That's the charm gugak has."
Kang Yu-na played the song through once more and listened in stillness. When it ended she opened her eyes and looked at him.
"Oppa! Do you have anything scheduled today?"
"Huh? No. I don't."
"Perfect. Get ready to pull an all-nighter here. We're finishing this song today."
"...What?"
His eyes went round. He had come to offer a little help and go home. Working together had not been part of the plan.
"No — I just came to give you a hand..."
He started to protest, but Kang Yu-na caught his sleeve and pulled him down into the chair beside her.
"I'll pay you royalties, okay? Come on! If you're sitting here helping, finishing it today shouldn't even be a stretch!"
Faced with all that blazing will, Kim Se-jun let out a long breath and accepted his fate.
The movie he had booked for the evening. He was going to have to cancel.
Park Young-ho's office.
Look into Kim Se-jun — Lim Tae-hyun's request, which had been an order in everything but name. To honor it, Park Young-ho had come back with everything there was to know. And after hearing it all, Lim Tae-hyun had offered a single sentence.
"So basically, he's just some nobody rookie, right?"
Park Young-ho could hardly believe his ears.
"I wouldn't go so far as to call him a nobody..."
"Come on. Is it that impressive for a rookie to pull numbers like that? You know me, don't you, boss? I hit number one the second I debuted."
Park Young-ho answered that with silence. It was true. The man's morals were a wasteland, but the talent was the real thing — and the face, too. He had already gone past Korea and become a name no one else in Asia could touch.
"Wow. She dumped me for this piece of trash?"
Lim Tae-hyun muttered it in a voice thick with disbelief, then turned his head toward Park Young-ho.
"Boss. You know when they're dropping?"
"Probably around September or October, I'd guess."
A thin, unpleasant smile slid across Lim Tae-hyun's mouth.
"Perfect. I'll start promoting then too."
"...! What? Tae-hyun!"
There was nothing to gain from going out in the same window as a chart powerhouse like Kang Yu-na. And if the other powerhouse was someone like Lim Tae-hyun himself, staggering the dates a little would have let them both eat. Charging in head-on was a blunder.
"Tae-hyun. Kim Se-jun aside, you can't just ignore Kang Yu-na..."
Park Young-ho said it carefully, watching the other man's face.
"Haa. Boss."
Lim Tae-hyun looked at him with cold eyes. He swept the hair back from one side of his head as if the whole conversation bored him, then drew a cigarette, set it between his lips, and spoke.